Crytek partner with AMD to bring Mantle support to CRYENGINE

March 19, 2014 by Crytek

Find out more about what the recently announced collaboration means for developers and players

Today brought the news that Crytek have struck up a partnership with technology pioneers AMD to add native support for their Mantle graphics API to CRYENGINE. The collaboration will pave the way for CRYENGINE users to take advantage of all the Mantle API offers in the near future – primarily an increased freedom to ensure optimal performance of games across all platforms.

Crytek's CEO and founder, Cevat Yerli, joined AMD’s “Introducing a New API for Graphics” at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week to share more about how Mantle features can help to enable lower-level and more efficient control of the graphics system. Among the topics he addressed were Crytek's desire to be among the first taking advantage of AMD's new tech, and, most importantly, the ultimate benefit to gamers brought about by a technology such as Mantle.

AMD's Matt Skynner – corporate vice president and general manager, Graphics Business Unit – also shared his excitement over the collaboration. “The Mantle graphics API offers breathtaking performance and unparalleled hardware control. We are proud to partner with Crytek to augment the award-winning CRYENGINE with these powerful new capabilities. Together, Mantle and CRYENGINE will represent a tremendous opportunity for game developers to easily prepare their studios for a graphics industry that’s rapidly becoming laser-focused on ‘closer-to-the-metal’ game development.”

Crytek and AMD have collaborated closely in the past, with the company's AMD CrossFire™ technology helping to power Crysis 3 when the game first wowed audiences at E3 in 2012. Crytek's R&D team says they have benefitted from the practical aspects of working with AMD tech. The reduced CPU overhead and better CPU scaling maintain a draw call count on lower spec CPUs that is usually reserved for higher quality settings. On the GPU front, async compute makes it easier to schedule graphics processing and utilize hardware resources for higher frame rates – meaning the team have been able to issue post processing asynchronously to run in parallel with, for example, shadowmap generation which is rasterizer, not alu, bound.

Reviewing the partnership overall, Crytek's Director of Business Development, Carl Jones, said it was a natural step to support AMD's Mantle. "Our ultimate aim has always been to make CRYENGINE the most powerful, adaptable tool it can be for developers, and this collaboration with AMD is further evidence of that. As we continue to embrace the best technology available we enable all CRYENGINE users to create unparalleled gaming experiences."